Europe

Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party (CWI England and Wales) General Secretary

No fundamental change to be expected from the Labour Party

A Tory majority government has been elected in Britain for the
first time since 1992. That this follows five years of savage cut-backs
to the public sector – by the Con-Dem coalition – is the greatest
indictment of New Labour. It also raises profound issues for the trade
unions and for the inevitable mass struggles to come.

In the aftermath of the British general election, contrasting emotions
were evident in the opposing camps. The Tories were naturally triumphant
– as were their capitalist backers – at the prospect of five more years
in power, with an overall Tory majority won for the first time in over
20 years. This victory was all the sweeter for prime minister David
Cameron given that he confessed to the other party leaders – Nick Clegg
and Ed Miliband – at the second world war commemorations, that he
expected to be preparing a resignation speech for himself and his
government!

The mood within the workers’ movement was exactly the opposite:
disappointment, dejection and even despair at the prospect of five more
years of pain, cuts in jobs, services and living standards, as well as
an onslaught on trade union and democratic rights. But also evident
among the more politically aware workers was the realisation that there
would be no ‘saviour’ ready to ride over the hill and rescue them from
the brutal government. They would have to rely on their own forces in
the battles to come.

Within a week of the elections, the Financial Times reported that
100,000 civil servants would be sacked. That comes on top of the one
million public-sector workers made redundant in the previous five years
through the Tories’ ‘long-term economic plan’ to chop away at the ‘big
state’ through a programme of savage privatisation. However, Cameron
would be well advised to heed the advice of the 19th-century general and
politician, the Duke of Wellington: “Nothing except a battle lost can be
half so melancholy as a battle won”. There is nothing now to protect
this government from the accumulated anger and bitterness of the poor
and the working class.

The shield of their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, has been
shredded as that party has been reduced to a mere eight seats. We
predicted at the beginning of their unholy alliance with the Tories in
2010 that they would be toast. The election has shown that this is
without a trace of butter or jam! They are not quite back to the
position of the early 1950s, when they had under 3% of the vote, but
they are confronted with the pitiful sight of a quarter of their
parliamentary party – two MPs – competing for the lonely position of the
leader of what is now an imitation of Shakespeare’s ‘ragamuffin army’!

Blairite charge

Labour’s defeat led to a rush to judgment by the bourgeois and its
press, echoed by the Labour right: that Miliband failed because he and
the campaign alienated ‘the people’, because it was too left-wing and
socialist. The ‘John Lewis family’ and the ‘aspirational’ sections of
the population were allegedly put off by strident attacks on the rich,
the ‘wealth creators’.

This was the theme of the Blairites, with the ‘eminence grise’ of the
right, Baron Mandelson, leading the charge. Tristram Hunt and Liz
Kendall fetched up the rear as they set out their credentials to be the
next leader of the Labour Party. However, Hunt quickly withdrew because
he could not assemble the required 35 nominations from the parliamentary
Labour Party, but also to consolidate support for Liz Kendall, who up to
now has hardly appeared on the radar of the labour movement.

Kendall has attacked Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite the
Union, for even daring to intervene in the Labour leadership campaign.
She also, incredibly, seeks to out-Tory the Tories literally, by calling
for 2% of GDP to be allocated to ‘defence’, a pledge that even Cameron
and chancellor George Osborne have refused to make.

However, the Blairites have selective memories. Haven’t they lost four
million Labour votes since 1997– three million from the working class –
during their stewardship of the party since the 1990s, when they managed
to swing the Labour Party to the right? Did they not effectively
eliminate Labour’s long-term aspiration for socialism? Gordon Brown
continued the work of Tony Blair in the run-up to the 2010 general
election. Miliband, in effect, carried on this work in this campaign. It
is true that there were tinges of radical phraseology but they were
accompanied by a public embrace of the cuts agenda of the Tories –
‘austerity-lite’ – a perpetuation of poverty.

There is so much nonsense in the arguments about the left and socialists
alienating ‘aspirational’ sections of the population. The working class
is inherently ‘aspirational’ and, therefore, instinctively opposed to
capitalism, the dog-eat-dog society, which cannot satisfy their
aspirations and needs. In the post-war economic boom of 1950-75, for
instance, capitalism was able to afford a few crumbs off its rich table.
Even then, the organised labour movement opposed the capitalist system,
defeated Labour’s right wing, led by Hugh Gaitskell, the original
‘Blairite’, and defended the long-term aspiration of socialism enshrined
in Clause IV Part 4 of Labour’s constitution.

In fact, the goal of socialism was a recognition by broad swathes of
workers that capitalism could not solve their ‘aspirations’,
particularly in a period of an acute economic crisis through which we
are presently passing. The Economist, the brutal face of world
capitalism, confessed a few weeks ago that its system was going through
“a grinding economic slump which crushed real wages” and, with it, the
overall living standards of the working class.

It is not just Miliband who has failed in recent elections. His
social-democratic cousins in Greece, Spain and elsewhere have suffered
electoral shipwreck because they were insufficiently distinguished in
class terms and programme from the open bourgeois parties. The
devastating economic crisis that began in 2008 has shattered the basis
of social democracy. In more benign or rosy economic circumstances, they
were able to promise reforms and were sometimes able to deliver some
benefits, albeit not enough, to the working class. That has now
disappeared and, therefore, all parties which remain within the
framework of capitalism are forced down the path of austerity – of
course, with much wringing of hands and regret.

No right turn

The social conditions existing in Britain could and should have resulted
in a defeat of the Tories. That they did not suffer a crushing electoral
setback was not down to the British working class turning to the right,
as some have argued. Indeed, a closer examination of electoral
statistics showed that the Tory vote actually increased only
fractionally, by 0.8%. Labour’s vote increased and in London, with a
mixed ethnic population, significantly so. A letter to the Financial
Times put the issue succinctly: “The overall vote of Conservative,
LibDem and UK Independence Party has dropped from 62% to 57.4%, while
Labour, SNP and the Greens have increased their total share from 31.7%
to 38.9%. There has been a reasonable shift left of voters’ intentions,
yet a dramatic shift right in the government”.

Tory pollster Lord Ashcroft reinforced this when he analysed the reasons
why almost four million voters opted for the UK Independence Party
(UKIP). It came second in 120 seats. While seduced into supporting
UKIP’s leader, Nigel Farage, and his party on immigration, on other
issues such as opposition to austerity, support for the NHS, etc, they
leaned towards the left. Labour’s incapacity to answer their fears on
immigration could only have been assuaged by fighting against poverty
wages, accompanied by a living wage of at least £10 an hour, as the
Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) demanded. This would have
laid the basis for class unity.

Moreover, the unmasking of Farage, a former City speculator, as the TUSC
election broadcast showed, could have opened up clear class divisions
among UKIP voters. This could have been underpinned by linking it to the
idea of a change in society, socialism, which was completely anathema to
Miliband and his entourage. This, together with the scandalous refusal
of Miliband to form a united front, an ‘anti-austerity alliance’, with
the Scottish National Party (SNP), were probably the two crucial factors
responsible for fatally undermining Labour’s chances.

The popularity of the SNP and the Scottish people’s wholesale rejection
of ‘red Tories’, like the discredited ex-leader of Scottish Labour, Jim
Murphy, was not restricted to Scotland. After the leaders’ debates
Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP were enthusiastically embraced by workers
and sections of the middle class in England, who were looking for a lead
in the battle against savage Tory austerity. There were petitions
launched in northern England with the slogan: ‘take us with you’! In
Merseyside, a semi-serious petition has been launched, taken up by the
Liverpool Echo, calling for secession of that part of England north of
the line from Merseyside to the Humber.

The SNP has been allowed temporarily to pick up the discarded clothes of
social democracy, by promising reforms, a fight against cuts,
maintaining present services, etc. But it has already presided over cuts
and more will be in the pipeline. The SNP is in a situation a bit
similar to Cameron. The scale of the victory in Scotland means it will
not be able to hide when the government cuts the ‘grant’ to Scotland, in
the form of ceding a measure of fiscal autonomy. The SNP will be ground
between the two millstones of an aroused and politically alert Scottish
working class and the pressure to be ‘practical’: to remain within the
framework of capitalism, which means administering cut-backs.
Significant opportunities will exist for Scottish TUSC to grow in this
situation.

A system in decay

The Tory government will employ the tactics of shock-and-awe in its
projected onslaught against the living standards of the working class,
its organisations and also on democracy itself. Nevertheless, it has
attempted to camouflage its real intentions – with Cameron and,
incredibly, the hated Osborne widely derided even in Conservative
circles for this relentless pursuit of austerity – by now employing the
language of ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘blue-collar conservatism’. We have been
here before, with Cameron extolling the virtues of ‘compassionate
conservatism’ only then to sign up to vicious capitalist austerity. This
led to Osborne being booed by disabled protesters and others at the
London Olympics in 2012.

The impression has been reinforced by the recent return to Britain of
former Cameron adviser, Steve Hinton, with his synthetic criticisms of
the British ‘ruling class’, while ruthlessly defending capitalism to the
hilt. He recommended that this country follow the model of the US with
its supposed small business entrepreneur culture. The truth is that the
US is a billionaire-dominated ‘democracy’ where the likes of the Koch
brothers are able to buy elections.

The idea that a capitalist renaissance will be generated by the
mushrooming of small businesses is a reflection of the senile decay of
capitalism and its spokespeople. The five million who are
‘self-employed’ are more like the Chinese or Russian peasants of old,
trying to scratch out a living on economically unviable units. In the
past, it was possible in some countries like Italy for small businesses
to play a certain role in the economic growth which took place during
the boom. But in this crisis, small businesses have gone to the wall
with many disappearing. Small businesses and the middle class in general
are under economic siege, unable to get loans from the banks and, in
general, experiencing a hand-to-mouth existence.

It is true that the labour movement must win over the intermediate
layers of society, but this can only be achieved by a consistent and
relentless struggle against the big monopolies, including the banks,
which strangle not just the working class but the middle class as well.
Moreover, whenever the working class moves into action, it draws behind
it significant sections of the intermediate layers in society.

Napoleon may have described Britain as a ‘nation of shopkeepers’. In
reality, however, it was powerful industrial firms, which in time became
giant monopolies, that allowed Britain to become the ‘workshop of the
world’ and demolish all in its path by capturing world markets and
establishing its rule over one quarter of humankind. That situation is
now merely a historical memory as Britain shrinks to the level of a
second or even a third-rate power, no longer able to fight a
Falklands-type war, for instance, because it cannot afford even one
aircraft carrier!

Inept Miliband

Its declining military power merely mirrors its devastating economic
decline, with all that means for the position of the working class in
terms of drastically declining living standards. The Tories managed to
hide this uncomfortable fact in the cacophony of North Korea-style
propaganda, orchestrated by Lynton Crosby, during the election campaign.
Miliband was not too left or socialist but exactly the opposite. So
inept was Miliband that he even allowed the Tories to peddle the myth
that it was Labour not capitalism that caused the economic crisis.

Over the past five years, he has propagated the idea of a mythical
‘responsible capitalism’. Just how ‘responsible’ is shown by the recent
revelations that six of the biggest banks have paid a total fine of $5.6
billion ‘voluntarily’ for rigging the markets in a “scandal, the FBI
said, involving criminality on a massive scale” (Financial Times). This
is on top of what the banks have already paid out because of the Libor
scandal – involving the illegal setting of interest rates – to the tune
of $9 billion. Not one banker has gone to jail! You can be sure that
long prison sentences await the Hatton Garden diamond burglars,
christened the ‘Diamond Geezers’ because they were mostly old-age
pensioners.

Modern capitalism is rife with corruption, making colossal profits from
drug running, prostitution, etc. The ‘owners’ of industry, and the CEOs
who manage these companies on their behalf while stuffing their pockets
with gold, are not the ‘wealth creators’ which they and their
apologists, including the right-wing of the labour movement, claim them
to be. The real creator of wealth (value) is the working class. It is
the goose which lays the golden egg of profits (surplus value) which, in
the words of Karl Marx, is the “unpaid labour of the working class”.
Mandelson – again, only after the election – ludicrously accused
Miliband of pursuing a ‘class war’ against the rich and wealthy,
something which Mandelson could never be accused of given his infamous
admission that he is “relaxed about the filthy rich”.

Yet the class struggle – over the division of the surplus value created
by the labour of the working class – exists, irrespective of Mandelson’s
childish illusions. And it is not just the open right-wingers, such as
Labour leadership contenders like Yvette Cooper. Her father was a past
president of the civil service union, Prospect, which is lining up with
the government against the militant civil service union, PCS. Mandelson
has been joined by Sadiq Khan, standing for selection as Labour’s
candidate for mayor of London, together with Andy Burnham, front runner
in the leadership contest. They all subscribe to the idea of the need to
appeal to ‘those above’ as well as those at the base of society.

We prefer the words of billionaire Warren Buffett: “Of course there is a
class struggle and it is my class which is winning it”. This has the
merit, at least, of posing issues in all their brutal honesty, in
contrast to the sugary illusions that ‘we are all in it together’, which
is not just the philosophy of Cameron and Osborne but of the
unreconstructed right-wing of the Labour Party.

Even the Sunday Times – from the systematically-lying Murdoch stable and
therefore signed-up supporters of the Tories in the election – through
its political commentator, Adam Boulton, cynically admitted after the
election: “The defining moment was Miliband’s refusal to admit that the
last Labour government overspent when he was challenged by a live
television audience. In part, it’s a bum rap. The Tories backed the
Blair-Brown government’s spending plans at the time. The UK government
did not cause the banking crisis, as the Conservatives claim. And, yes,
the economy was already growing when George Osborne grabbed the
controls”.

Only after the election, as the Financial Times informed us, did the
Office for National Statistics report: “Almost a third of the British
population, more than 19 million people, fell below the poverty line for
at least one year between 2010 and 2013. The figure was higher than the
25% average across the EU as a whole and was only exceeded by Greece and
Latvia”. This section of the population is not able to shop in John
Lewis because their parlous circumstances compel them to frequent
Poundshop, Lidl and Aldi. Some do not even shop at all because they are
too busy lining up at food banks, which have increased 15-fold since
2010.

How was it then, with conditions like this and with 60,000 people being
evicted from their homes last year because they could not pay the rent,
the highest for 14 years, that Cameron’s wretched government managed to
return to power? The election campaign left in its wake the pervasive
feeling that the Con-Dem government was there for the taking, that it
could have been defeated. Therefore, the election was a battle lost that
could have been won.

The TUSC challenge

TUSC, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, in contrast, conducted
an energetic and forceful campaign, without the financial backing –
wasted money, as it turned out – which was given by the trade union
leadership to Labour. Moreover, TUSC suffered a blackout from the whole
media (see article, p16). It got very limited publicity, although its
spokespersons were very effective, as were the candidates who appeared
in hustings all over the country. In this election, TUSC arrived as a
national force.

It was a considerable achievement to collect the resources, including
finances, to stand in enough seats to secure a very effective election
broadcast. It was tremendous to see a young firefighter boldly declaring
to millions: “We save people, not banks”. This was despite the
considerable lengths, bordering on sabotage, to which the capitalist
broadcasting authorities went to try and prevent the broadcast from
taking place. TUSC achieved a creditable total of just under 120,000
votes in the parliamentary and local elections that took place at the
same time.

We anticipated sneering criticism from our opponents after the election,
which is no different to that which was aimed against Labour pioneers
like Keir Hardie. He received just 617 votes in his first attempt to
break the workers’ movement away from the discredited Liberal party. He
succeeded in the end and TUSC, or a similar movement along the same
lines, will also become a reality. The same derision greeted James
Connolly’s attempts in elections in Ireland and other pioneers elsewhere.

TUSC and its supporters, including the Socialist Party, are in no way
deflected from the task of building on the achievements of this
election. The criticisms, as yet, have been muted. The labour movement
is digesting the effects of the election and pondering the upcoming
Labour leadership contest. However, those who expect a fundamental
change in the approach of Labour and its proposed leadership contestants
are due to be severely disappointed once again.

Labour and the unions

It is clear that Andy Burnham is the preferred choice of the trade union
leaders, probably including Len McCluskey. Yet Burnham has publicly
criticised McCluskey for suggesting a ‘turn to the left’. Burnham also
showed that he did not have a fundamentally different position to
Miliband and Labour during the election or afterwards. He was
responsible for Labour’s programme on health and yet, during the
election, he attempted to dampen down expectations by pointing out that
the NHS would not be able to meet everybody’s needs. Moreover, he has
agreed with the orchestrated attacks from the right on the unions,
criticising ‘interference’ in Labour’s election contest!

The trade union movement heaved the Labour Party up on its shoulders,
created it from scratch, to become its political expression. It backed
the introduction of socialist aims in 1918 following the Russian
revolution and also prevented these from being expunged by the Labour
right during the 1950s. Now, it is accused in effect, as Militant was in
the 1980s, of being ‘a party within the party’. We predicted that this
day would come after we were forced out of the Labour Party. We said the
left would be attacked and that, eventually, the trade unions themselves
would be effectively neutered until the Labour Party became a British
version of the US Democratic Party. It is clearly the ‘second eleven’ of
capitalism and a leadership will be elected that would be ‘safe’ and
defend capitalism, like Blair did so effectively.

That situation has now come to pass but, unfortunately, the trade union
leadership, including left-led unions like Unite and its general
secretary Len McCluskey, have not drawn all the necessary conclusions.
Unite drew on the desperation of its members to see the back of the
Con-Dems to donate colossal sums to Labour before and during the
campaign. This project has failed abjectly and it is necessary to
conclude that there should be a clear break and the formation of a new
workers’ party. TUSC, with the support of the RMT – and in the wake of
the election hopefully others, including the unions, will join in the
project – has given an idea of what would be possible if the weight and
the finances of the unions were thrown behind it.

If we do not move in this direction, the union leaders will come into
collision with the whole rank and file. They will be looking for a
strategy of action to combat the government’s offensive against the
unions with its new restrictive measures on ballots. Although barely 24%
of the total electorate voted for the Tories in the election, they are
proposing legislation that unions must achieve a 50% turnout in ballots
for industrial action – and, in emergency services, that at least 40% of
the total members balloted should be in agreement – for any action to
take place. Even the Financial Times warned the government: “The 40%
hurdle for essential services in effect requires workers to vote for
action by a supermajority – a 55-45% majority for action on a 70%
turnout would not be enough to organise action, for example. The
Conservative general election vote fell short of this hurdle”.

However, editorials, even in the most prestigious capitalist journals,
will not compel this government to step back. Only the most urgent and
determined action holds out the possibility of achieving this. The rail
workers, in their magnificent turnout and vote for the first national
rail strike in 21 years, show all workers how they must react to this
government. It is not enough to complain about the unions being reduced
to begging like Oliver Twist, as TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady,
has done. All unions need a strategy of coordinated action, culminating
in a one-day general strike. This, together with a clear rupture from
the bankrupt, discredited Labour Party, are the minimum steps required
for working-class people and their organisations to prepare to defeat
the greatest challenge to them since the dark days of Thatcherism.

We have confidence that the basic core of the trade unions and the
working class in general will meet the declaration of war by this
government with a robust response. The choice is not struggle or no
struggle but between organised action or scattered movements of young
people and workers forced to act because of the nature of the attacks.
The 5,000-strong demonstration in Bristol days after the general
election and the mobilisation of young people in Downing Street are
warnings of what is to come. The Socialist Party will play its full role
in this battle.